Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by M.D. Mark Vonnegut Page B

contract with alcohol. I can’t remember why, but I drank much more than I usually did, and nothing happened. I drank beer steadily through the morning and then had two glasses of bourbon. No click, no feeling a little looser, nothing.
    We caught a bunch of bluefish. The mate filleted them and I grilled them over charcoal with garlic salt and everyone said they tasted great just like always, but I couldn’t get away from the feeling that another shoe was going to drop.
    What if you pick up the early signs too late?
    Back home, I was playing the piano better than ever. I’d be playing the piano and singing and start crying after a beer ortwo. Unless we had a business lunch on Friday, I never drank at work or before getting home, somewhere around 6 P.M. I sometimes kept beer in the office refrigerator on Fridays if I was going to be going to the Cape, but that was okay because of the traffic. If I had had a drinking problem, I would have hidden it, but I didn’t so I didn’t.
    The thing that keeps the gambler gambling is the illusion that he has control, special knowledge that will make him come out on top. If the gambler comes to believe that he is up against a random number generator and that what he once thought of as special knowledge is worthless, he stops gambling. What keeps the drinker drinking is the certainty that she can stop whenever she wants. It never would have occurred to me that stopping the pathetic little bit of drinking I did would have mattered.
    I kept in touch with MGH by serving as the ward attending once a year and teaching in the ER one night a week along with admitting my patients there. It was a way of giving back. They paid me about sixteen dollars an hour.
    Four years after I’d finished my residency at MGH, right after Thanksgiving, a twelve-year-old girl came in having had a seizure that had stopped by the time she arrived. We examined her, drew labs, reassured her parents, called her pediatrician, and had the resident doing pediatric neurology come down to see her. He started her on medication, decided she didn’t have to be admitted, and set up a time to see her in the pedi-neuro clinic two days later.
    Off the top of my head I gave the medical students a ten-minute lecture on the differential diagnosis, work-up, and treatment of pediatric seizures. I was a hardworking, integral part of a wonderful hospital and a wonderful medical school and awonderful city, full of people all doing the best they could. I was headed off into the sunset with two hours of movie left.
    My final drink was the stale last half of a two-dollar bottle of red wine I’d hoped might taste more like a ten-dollar bottle, guzzled and gulped through chopped cork fragments left behind by a paring knife when the corkscrew failed to get the job done. I had rules that guaranteed I would never get into trouble with drinking. If I broke a rule, I had to stop drinking for a week to prove there was no problem. Finding myself drinking the bottle I had recorked after dinner violated both the half-bottle-of-wine-per-night rule and the no-alcohol-after-Xanax rule as well as the not-being-pathetic-and-desperate rule. All the trouble that followed that night could have been avoided if I had just taken an extra milligram of Xanax and stayed in bed where I belonged or if I hadn’t had so many stupid rules.
    When I stopped drinking the next day, I threw in the Xanax as a generous gesture. The first twelve hours went well. “If you do something every day, you won’t be able to figure out what it’s doing to you unless you stop doing it,” I kept repeating. I was an almost-forty-year-old, home-owning, married father of two boys who was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and who coached soccer.
    Time started stretching in unpredictable ways. Maybe orange juice would help. My first appointment that morning after slugging down a quart of orange juice was a mother who wanted to talk to me about her son’s alcoholism. Once your